so ive been doing sweepstakes CW for about 6 years now and always just run SO1R, usually put up decent numbers but i keep seeing guys on the 3830 scores page just absolutely crushing it with SO2R setups and im starting to wonder if im leaving a lot of rate on the table. my current setup is a k3 and an ic-7300 sitting right next to each other and ive got antenna switching sorted out between a 3el yagi on 15 and a dipole on 40 but i never actually tried running both radios at the same time in a contest. my main concern is honestly the interference between the two rigs when theyre both transmitting even close in time. i know the k3 has the sub-receiver but im talking actual SO2R with two separate antennas and two separate transmitters. is the learning curve as brutal as everyone says or is it one of those things that clicks after like one contest

the interference thing is real and its the first thing you have to solve before worrying about anything else. if your antennas are close together and you try to TX on both at the same time youre gonna have a bad day, the front end on the 7300 especially doesnt love that. most serious SO2R guys run bandpass filters, the 4o3a or dunestar ones are the usual recommendations, and you interlock the PTT so only one radio transmits at a time. the station interlock is kinda the whole foundation of making it work without blowing up receivers.

as for the learning curve yeah its real but its not like impossible. i did my first SO2R attempt at arrl dx cw a few years back and honestly the first four or five hours i was slower than i wouldve been on one radio because i kept screwing up which vfo was which. but by the end of the contest i was running 40 on one radio and sniffing for mults on 15 with the other and it felt pretty natural. n1mm has decent SO2R support built in now, the audio switching stuff in particular. just go into it expecting to sacrifice rate early in the contest while your brain adjusts

honestly i tried SO2R once and went back to SO1R, at least for SS. the mult situation in sweepstakes is different than dx contests because you need sections not rare dx entities so the second radio mult hunting thing feels less critical to me. where SO2R really shines imo is when you can run a pileup on one radio and grab a quick S&P qso on the other during your own turnaround time. that part does add up over a 24 hour op. but if your antennas arent well isolated you spend more time chasing rf gremlins than you do making contacts and that drives me insane. if you do try it spend a weekend just testing the two radio setup outside of contest conditions first, transmit on one and see what the other radio does, check the s-meter see if youre getting any bleedthrough. worth knowing before 1800z on a saturday